Ernst & Young LLP (EY) and Microsoft announce that they have expanded Microsoft’s blockchain-based solution for gaming rights and royalties management to provide a financial system of record, from contract creation to payment and reconciliation.
Microsoft plans to use the expanded blockchain functions to enable its Microsoft Xbox gaming partners and its network of artists, musicians, writers and other content creators to gain increased visibility into tracking, management and payment processing for royalty contracts.
EY expects to help its business-to-business enterprise clients that have contractually driven, multiparty cash flow distributions to create similar blockchain platforms to help them automate contract-related calculations and processing.
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With its expanded blockchain, Microsoft is able to:
- Accelerate contract digitization for faster contract creation using artificial intelligence (AI), based on Microsoft Azure
- Seamlessly generate and integrate statements and invoices with enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to process and record royalties with increased speed and greater visibility and transparency
- Generate accounting entries from the blockchain platform into existing ERP applications for improved efficiency and accounting capabilities
- Incorporate the controls and compliance standards required to meet the criteria for the solution to function as a financial system of record
The expanded solution reduces processing time by 99%, with 100% near real-time calculation of royalties using digital contracts across game development partners. The blockchain application has been tested to support performance under a high volume of usage — the software industry’s so-called “soak testing” — and is capable of processing two million transactions per day.
These new capabilities will help improve the end-to-end royalties experience by integrating with Microsoft’s gaming ecosystem and providing all of their partners on the blockchain network earlier visibility and availability of data in statements and invoices from a single source: the Microsoft rights and royalties blockchain. The blockchain extension builds on the continued collaboration between EY and Microsoft.
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